Games such as Batman: Arkham VR can cause player disorientation, and feel like short-form experiences, designed to introduce users to the virtual reality proposition.
Photograph: Warner Bros

One of the big stories to come out of this year’s E3 video games conference was that virtual reality was definitely there. Not hiding in little booths at the peripheral of the main halls, but there, front and centre, with big publishers and big franchises on board.

We saw demos of Resident Evil 7 (RE7) and Fallout 4 running in VR, we saw standalone VR experiences in the form of Star Trek: Bridge Crew and Batman: Arkham VR and we had the promise of virtual reality modes for major releases such as Final Fantasy XV and Star Wars: Battlefront. Meanwhile, Sony promised that 50 titles would be available for its PlayStation VR headset by the end of the year, showing that its (comparatively) accessible, wallet-friendly device had major developer support. Suddenly, over the course of four hot June days in Los Angeles, we seemed to have the killer apps that every consumer technology needs and that VR had arguably been missing.

Or did we?

Reactions to E3 as a showcase for the potential of VR gaming have been mixed – especially from those working within the sector. We spoke to a number of virtual reality specialists about the demos shown at the LA Convention centre last month, and while there is a general consensus that mainstream support for the medium is positive, there were plenty of reservations.

The Resident Evil 7 VR demo created an excellent sense of place, and didn’t rely too heavily on jump shocks, which are more invasive in VR. But its movement system made some E3 attendees feel sick. Photograph: PR Company Handout

“It’s brilliant to see VR being taken seriously by large publishers and developers that are not making their own hardware,” says Katie Goode, a veteran virtual reality game developer at small studio, Triangular Pixels. “It means big IP within VR, with Fallout 4 possibly being the most interesting and exciting announcement. For us smaller VR devs, it could also mean there’s more chance of getting funding for our titles from major publishers. However, quite a lot that was shown seems to ignore all the work and research the VR developer community has been sharing and shouting about for some time.”

A key example here is Capcom’s RE7 demo. The game will be playable in VR in full when it arrives next January, but the version shown at E3, while impressively creepy, relied heavily on traditional movement controls. Although players could turn their head to look around, they also needed to use the analogue stick for fine-tuning, and this separation of physical head movement from in-game motion led to nausea for a lot of attendees.

“It’s not as simple as just turning on the ‘make it VR’ switch in your leading IP,” says Tom Gillo, VP of development at UK-based VR developer, nDreams. “Any of us that have been in VR development these past three years know that comfort is a huge issue and, in particular, traversal in VR is notoriously tricky. I wasn’t surprised to read about VR sickness being reported by many after playing RE7 VR; it seems they haven’t reworked the control scheme to account for virtual reality and they - or rather players of the demo – paid the price.

“This, though, is the challenge that VR presents. It’s just not good enough to simply take an existing control scheme and expect it to work – the rulebook changed with the new medium and developers really need to spend the time – and money – to figure out conceits that work well and then design controls to support that conceit.”

So if using the left-stick to provide artificial locomotion is a fast lane to motion sickness, what’s the solution? For the past few years, VR developers have been experimenting with alternative methods of simulating movement and many – such as nDreams with its VR title The Assembly and Oculus with its own project Damaged Core – have gone for something very different: teleportation. The player looks at a space in the virtual world and hits a button on their controller to move there. Judging by the very limited E3 demo, this is what Bethesda is experimenting with in its VR version of Fallout 4, while Batman: Arkham VR provides specific points in the scene that the player can select and move to. Both, however, are a little clunky: “player disorientation and breaking immersion are big issues with that system,” says Goode.

Tom Gillo claims that nDreams has already refined beyond this approach to something more subtle. “While we do offer a traditional first-person control scheme, by default players are presented with our ‘blink mode’ – a line-of-sight based movement scheme that enables players to transition from point-to-point within the game literally in the blink of an eye,” he says. “It’s too fast to make a person sick, but just slow enough to register as movement rather than a teleport. We spent a lot of time refining and testing the scheme and we’re very confident that the vast majority if people will not feel unwell when playing. This system has enabled us to build a full five-hour game.”

He also points to Bullet Train, a virtual reality project from Unreal developer Epic Games, which uses a similar hybrid system that sits between traditional motion and teleportation. “It demonstrates that they absolutely get it,” says Gillo. “Epic, arguably the seminal FPS developer, hasn’t shoe-horned in standard FPS controls, but instead built a new locomotion and control system to support VR and touch controls from the ground up.”

Elsewhere, Electronic Arts has bypassed the issue by setting its Battlefront: X-Wing VR mission in the cockpit of a spacecraft, while Ubisoft (which has invested heavily and relatively early in VR experimentation) has discovered that narrowing the player’s field of vision in its interesting sim Eagle Flight reduces instances of nausea. “Exploring a scene with your hands rather than your legs seems to give better results at this stage,” says Dave Ranyard, an independent virtual reality developer who previously headed up Sony’s VR division. “My advice to developers is to avoid navigation at the moment and concentrate on immersion. I truly believe someone will crack navigation in the next year, but I haven’t seen it yet.”

What E3 also showed is that there’s uncertainty in the mainstream industry about what format virtual reality projects should take. While both Resident Evil 7 and Fallout 4 will let players take on a major narrative adventure in VR, Star Trek: Bridge Crew and Batman: Arkham VR feel much more like heavily mediated short-form experiences, designed to introduce users to the virtual reality proposition.

That’s not necessarily a negative. Star Trek: Bridge Crew is a co-op challenge, which gives four players different roles on the bridge of a USS starship, requiring them to collaborate on a series of mission objectives. Resembling a high-tech version of the award-winning mobile game Space Team, it assumes you’ll be able to find three friends with VR set-ups (the game will support HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR when it arrives in the autumn), but it’s interesting in that it introduces social dynamics to the virtual space.

“I’m super excited for Bridge Crew,” says virtual reality developer, Joe Radak. “I think of all the VR games announced by the major publishers at E3, this one showed the best use of VR and the Rift/Touch capabilities. It’s social, it uses the hand motion controllers very well in ways that you can’t do in traditional media and on top of that, it looks immersive and fun. It showed that there are some AAA companies that really took time to research what works and what doesn’t.”

In Star Trek: Bridge Crew, players get to use the Rift and Vive motion controllers to make frantic arm gestures at each other during heated moments. Photograph: Ubisoft

In the Batman Arkham VR demo, players had to modes to chose from. A simple “be the Batman” option let you descend from Wayne Manor into the Batcave then try on the suit as well as toy with a few bat gadgets. It’s basic, but it provides a powerful sense of embodiment, the PlayStation Move controllers giving players expressive use of Batman’s arms and really inhabit the costume, and the role. A second mode provides a short narrative involving an attack on Nightwing, which leaves the hero sprawled in an alley. The player, as Batman, has to run through recorded witness footage to work out what happened. There’s little action as such, and it feels like a virtual reality take on the detective mode from the other Arkham titles. But again, it’s the work of a developer prodding at the technology.

The question is, are mainstream publishers and developers exploring lessons that the VR sector has already mastered? “We’d have loved it if these new titles were more like a long-form, fully-fledged game rather than more limited mini experiences, especially as that’s not what gamers have come to expect from those IPs,” says nDreams co-founder, Patrick O’Luanaigh.” It does feel as though some of these developers haven’t been paying attention to a lot of the advances made and best practice techniques established by the VR development community over the last 18 months.”

Radak agrees. “The E3 demos showed that a lot of the AAA companies are still learning VR’s capabilities and that they’re behind the indie developers right now,” he says. “That’s not to say that the indies have fully discovered all of VR’s capabilities yet either, but the AAA companies are making mistakes that almost all the indie developers have already made, learned from and shared with each other – specifically looking at locomotion methods and what makes ‘fun’ VR gameplay. If the AAA publishers took some time to talk with small indie devs, like those behind Fantastic Contraption, Chronos, Budget Cuts, Cosmic Trip and many others, that would go a long way for the industry”.

Of course, it’s too simplistic to suggest that all virtual reality innovation is going to come from indies, while mainstream publishers trundle along behind attempting to retro-fit their most profitable IPs with VR titbits. Ubisoft is clearly innovating in the VR space, and projects like Epic’s Bullet Train and Insomniac’s promising Edge of Nowhere, a Lovecraftian horror adventure set in the Antarctic, show that big, traditional studios are just as likely to successfully exploit this burgeoning technology.

“For me one of the highlights of the E3 was seeing Double Fine announcing their VR title, Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin,” says VR developer Daniel Ernst. “They have a history of story-driven games with heart and character. For me one of the most attractive characteristics of a point and click adventure is lack of pressure: no deaths, no push to get from A to B … instead you can let the world sink in. This focus on story and experiencing unique spaces works so incredibly well in VR.”

Perhaps what E3 really showed was that the idea of virtual reality as a “genre” rather than a “platform” is a mistaken one. Developers will need to forge new game styles and new conventions and these will serve a wide variety of experiences that may not resemble those that we’ve been having for the last 40 years. The biggest mistake the industry could make now would be to rush VR translations of successful properties on to the market. Video game consumers will forgive a lot of things, but nausea is not one of them.